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We participate in communities online for various reasons. Optimally, we'd build a corpus, gain domain-expertise recognition, land a sweet gig, sell the film rights and get points on the box office receipts. Short of that, what do we want in return for our time and efforts answering questions on LinkedIn, reviewing books on Amazon, or discussing the news on Google+?

Your interactions with the community lead to trophies, badges, titles and other visible rewards that set you apart as a knowledgeable, valued member.

These reputations and rewards systems have a long history

On Usenet and IRC (the original newsgroups and chat rooms), your reputation was measured by peers and the moderators or operators who ran these fora. If you stuck around long enough, and participated well in the eyes of the Ops, you could be given Ops status yourself.

On message boards hosted by most online communities, the date you joined and the number of messages you've left accompanied every thought you left behind. As you participated, your title might change from "Newbie" to "Frequenter" to "Prolific Poster." Each of those levels could come with additional privileges and opportunities. (Prodigy and About.com, e.g., recruited paid community leaders from among the particularly engaging participants.)

Slashdot, an early social news site powered by community submissions, codified much of this in their moderation system and concept of Karma. Karma was a "hard" reputation score: a running tally of how much you submitted, how many votes your submissions received, the amount of discussion generated directly from those submissions.

Good Karma permitted you to rate others' comments. It also let you rate how other comments were rated. This "meta moderation" -- curating the curators -- worked to thwart the efforts of "enterprising cabals" working together to shepherd -- or highjack - the conversation to their ends.

Karma took the concept of IRC's Ops and scaled it by making a game of curation: For the Moderators, it was a little power trip as you got to play comment kingmaker. Moderating the moderators was a level above that. Most importantly, for the community at large, the discussion was (and is) filterable: for example, "Show me only comments that have have been selected as interesting."

This created a dialog that wasn't just self-policing, but communally-optimized across thousands of daily submissions and conversations and tens- or hundreds of thousands of daily visitors.

Trophies, badges and mayorships have value as rewards in their environments. On "more serious" services -- where significant amounts of thought, expertise and time are expected for contributing meaningfully -- what type of rewards compel participation? Calling out the comments of your choice; Finding and featuring Twitter messages related to your topic of specialty; Picking the photos and articles to feature on a page where you participate; Becoming "Homepage Editor" for a day - These are some possible rewards for exceptional community members.

What rewards would be of value to you as a valued member of the communities where you participate?